When she died, she wanted it to be like this. Not in a hospital bed like her grandmother. Not in a sad little hole on Mars with a gun in her mouth or a gut full of pills like the failures of veterans’ outreach. She wanted to win, to protect her tribe and wipe the enemy into a paste of blood and dismay. But failing that, she wanted to die trying. A snippet of something she’d once read popped in her head: Facing fearful odds protecting the bones of her fathers and the temples of her gods. Yeah. Like that.
“Shit,” Alex said. “I’ve got six more. We’re up to sixteen fast- movers.”
“I’ve got ’em,” Bobbie said.
“Why are they spacing them out like that?” Holden asked.
“The Shinsakuto’s getting ready to flip and burn,” Bobbie said. “I’m guessing Fred talked Ceres into helping.”
“I did indeed,” Fred said. “Just got confirmation.”
“If our PDCs are going to have a chance chewing these fuckers up, I’ve got to punch it,” Alex said.
“Everyone in your couches?” Holden said. There was a chorus of response. No one said no. “Do what you need to do, Alex.”
He looked over at her. Pilot’s and gunner’s stations were the only ones in the cockpit. It was designed that way because if systems started failing, they could shout to each other. They had to be able to coordinate, because from now to the end of the battle, no one else mattered. Every other life on the ship was about to become cargo.
“You good for this, Gunny?”
“Let’s kill these assholes,” she said.
The Rocinante jumped forward, hitting her in the back like an assault. Her arms slammed into the gel, her fingers against the control barely able to move. The images on the screen went fuzzy, her eyes deforming past her ability to refocus them. She tensed her legs and arms, pushing the blood back to her core. The couch chimed and a fresh blast of cheap juice hit her bloodstream. Her gasps sounded like someone choking. Eight gs, maybe? Maybe more. It had been too fucking long.
An endless time passed, and then a chime told her the first round of torpedoes were in PDC range, and her targeting solution kicked in. Alex bent the Roci’s path, forced the attackers to shift. Gave her an extra fraction of a second between them. The PDCs lit up, going gold on her display as they fired. The deep chattering tapped through the deck with each one like she was playing music. Four torpedoes flamed out at once, but the other six danced away from the streams of metal, then spiraled closer to the ship. Alex banked hard, catching one with the edge of the drive plume, making the other five maneuver. She caught four. The fifth shifted, evaded, streaked close—
Alex tried to yell, but it came out as little more than a high squeak. The ship turned the extra three degrees to bring another PDC arc into play, and the enemy torpedo died, falling behind them in bright shards and melting in their plume.
A message appeared on her screen from Alex. TAKE IT TO THEM?
The two ships were bearing down on the Roci, pushing hard to narrow the distance. She didn’t know if that was bold or foolhardy. Probably they didn’t either. Ships full of Belters weren’t known for loving high-g burns, but this was war. You took the risks you had to take. But the third ship had peeled off. And two points, her old sergeant used to say, defined an opportunity. Those bad guys were awfully close to each other.
DONNE, she typed back, and didn’t bother fixing the error.
She routed the five torpedoes between the Pella and the Koto in a starburst. T
he Free Navy ships were firing PDCs at the Rocinante now, the rounds coming like ropes of pearls on the screen. Alex maneuvered around them easily. Range was too far still for close-quarters battle tactics to apply, but maybe the Belters didn’t know that. Or just meant it as an insult.
She watched the curving arcs of PDC fire shift to find her torpedoes as they burned for the abstract line between the two ships. Two of hers died. Three. Four. But the fifth curved into the space between the Koto and the Pella where their tracking software would recognize that the PDC fire that would stop the torpedo would also riddle the friendly on the other side. The two ships lurched apart, and the Koto dropped a torpedo that took out Bobbie’s attacker just a few seconds before impact.
The maneuver had bought them a few moments, but at the cost of one-quarter of their total torpedo stores. It wasn’t a game she could afford to keep playing when the ante was so high. But by then she’d put in her next firing solution and passed it to Alex.
To his credit, he didn’t question her. In a single instant, the gravity vanished, the Roci’s Epstein dropped to zero. Her couch slammed to the side, the hard spin of the maneuvering thrusters whipped them around. The custom-built keel-mounted rail gun made the ship jump as it fired. It was the one weapon the Roci had that wasn’t standard for a Martian corvette. The rotation continued until they were back on their old course, and then ten gs slammed her back into her couch as the Epstein drive kicked back on and the counterthrusters killed the spin.
A high-speed three-sixty with a precision-timed rail gun shot halfway through the spin wasn’t exactly standard combat tactics for Martian frigates, but she thought her old combat-tactics instructors would have approved.
The sudden crushing weight of thrust brought a wave of nausea, and her heart stuttered in a confusion of fluid dynamics and pressure. She must have blacked out for a moment, because she didn’t see the Koto hit. Only the glowing plume of superheated gas expanding behind it where it had dropped core. Even pressed into the crash couch, she managed a smile. She waited to see if the Pella would break off, go to the aid of her fallen comrade.
It didn’t.
Bobbie fed a new firing solution, passed it to Alex, and they tried again. A weightless, spinning moment, the kick of the rail gun, and slammed back into the couch like an assault. The Pella knew now. At the vast distances between them, even the fraction of a second that it took to spin the Rocinante around was enough for the enemy to anticipate them and dodge. She threw two more torpedoes at the Pella, but they were shot down well before they could do damage.
The Pella launched another round of torpedoes, but without the Shinsakuto and the Koto to box them in, Bobbie wasn’t worried. The complexities of the battle looked to be over. Now it became longer and simpler and worse. Something in her trachea slid where it wasn’t meant to be and she forced out a cough, her head spinning a little when she did.
This was how they’d end now. A long, desperate race to see who ran out of PDC rounds or torpedoes first. Who had allies near enough to complicate the situation. But before any of that, there was the braking threshold. The point of no return at which they wouldn’t have enough reaction mass left to match the thrust they’d already pumped into their vector. They’d be trapped in a desperately long orbit, at the mercy of whoever came for them. That was her hard deadline.
Fighting to move her fingers against the built-in controls, she sent a message to Holden: DISTRACT THEM.
A moment later, a reply arrived: ???